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Oh, You Never Knew It! – Jan. 17

:: In 1918, an accident at the Jackson Independent Pharmaceutical Company caused a tank to burst, releasing 1.7 million gallons of the company’s patented Menth-O-Lux mentholated topical creme (a similar but different-enough-so-as-to-avoid-legal-action competitor to Vicks VapoRub) down Pikers Hill, in the Benson Park neighborhood. The initial six-foot-high wave damaged nearby buildings and killed eleven people and three horses, with the resulting four-foot-deep river of slightly clear muck ensnaring many more as it slowly flowed down hill to the old Lewison Quarry, which had years before become a spring-fed lake.

The cleanup took weeks, with virtually the entire city smelling, as the Evening Ledger reported at the time, “like the sleeping chamber of a weak asth-matic child.” To this day, people visit the small observation dock at Lewison Quarry during cold and flu season, convinced that the vapors actually do some good. They are more likely to be inhaling oil from automobiles and trolley cars which were discarded in its almost bottomless depths by the city until the mid-1950s.

Perhaps a man, or woman, who spends all of his or her time sketching strange buildings – detailing elevators that lead to elevators and hotel rooms that interconnect to secret swimming pools in which hundreds of people sit, talking – finds that his (or her) sketchbook has been stolen.
Fifteen years later, then, this person is on vacation with friends – but the hotel they’ve chosen looks awfully familiar.
Too familiar.
It’s his building.